A Quote by Octavia E. Butler
My race and sex had a great deal more to do with what people believed I could do than with what I actually could do.
Related Quotes
I created a paradigm by which I could succeed, and up until recently it was the only way I could do it. I could not take the brunt of standing in the light of my own work. There was a Faustian bargain I could not make. I could have you mock me for wearing funny clothes that I could deal with. But I couldn't deal with actually standing in the light of my own musical power. That's the difference now. It's like, okay, no more of that, you're done.
Halfway through the decade, we realized that we had a great team and that we could do great things, and that we could probably have something here that we believed we had a chance to reach greatness.
I can see that "reap" and "deep," "prayers" and "bears," . . . do rhyme, and so I suppose it is a splendid effort, but if you had written it in plain prose, I could have understood it a great deal better and read it a great deal more easily.
Actors go into it because it gives us the chance to play people a great deal more interesting than we are, and to say things infinitely wittier and more intelligent than anything we could think of.
Neanderthals might think differently than we do. We know that they had a larger cranial size. They could even be more intelligent than us. When the time comes to deal with an epidemic or getting off the planet or whatever, it's conceivable that their way of thinking could be beneficial.
I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal.
I remember everyone telling me I had to think positive when I was writing my first book. If I believed I could do it, then I could! If I pictured myself published, then it was going to happen! Which sounded great, except...could I do it? If I didn't think I could, was I doomed to fail? What if I was almost totally sure I would fail? I am here to tell you-what matters is sticking with it.
You could do much more in movies than you could on TV, and even movies were heavily censored. But in television, the areas of timorousness were fairly laid out. Race relations. Sex. Politics. There was a whole conglomeration of taboo themes. And even to date, though television has become a much freer medium, it's still far less free, far less creatively untrammeled than are the movies. They're infinitely more adult in that respect.
I believed even then that if I could transform my experience into poetry I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own. I thought too that if I could write about it I could come to understand it; I believed that if I could understand my life—or at least the part my work played in it—I could embrace it with some degree of joy, an element conspicuously missing from my life.
When I was council president I had a rule that people could sleep on the job. I modified the rule. You could actually sleep in public if you weren't sitting down. I had three people who actually perfected the art of sleeping while standing.
Neanderthals might think differently than we do. They could even be more intelligent than us. When the time comes to deal with an epidemic or getting off the planet, it's conceivable that their way of thinking could be beneficial.
We had all the advantages of being in, you know, the '50s and the '60s, where a one-income household could actually support a family. And mom was around and wanted nothing more than to just, you know, do everything she could for her kids.
For a long time, I believed that a great piece of music on its own could do more to stir the soul than any other single art form.
I had to lie so much about sex, first when I was 15, because I wasn't supposed to be having it. And then when I got older, I lied to everybody I was having sex with, so I could have sex with other people.
In your thirties, you're much more comfortable with sex. First of all, sex is something you've done more. You know you can have sex just to have sex; you can have sex with friends; you can have sex with people you love; you can have sex with people you don't like, but the sex is good. And you can joke about sex much more.
He believed that he must, that he could and would recover the good things, the happy things, the easy tranquil things of life. He had made mistakes, but he could overlook these. He had been a fool, but that could be forgiven. The time wasted--must be relinquished. What else could one do about it? Things were too complex, but they might be reduced to simplicity again. Recovery was possible.
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